raimund

Should be possible to write some server software that interprets these signals and carries them out on the disk images. Are these commands transferred into the floppy drive as n bit parallel signals or as serial? The accesses to the floppy appear quite slow. And I dont think it's really necessary to use RS232. Shouldn't USB1.1 with it's 12 MBits/s be sufficient, even if commands and data are transferred to the floppy in parallel and would need to be serialized? Correct me if I'm wrong: it appears to me that the ST would need to be equipped with an extra board that would replace the floppy drive. The board would have to turn the data to the floppy into a serial data stream. Once that is achieved it should be possible to use USB as method to actually transport the data to the Linux box. The Linux box would need a kernel module that could get loaded automatically once the ST would be plugged in (custom set vendorID/deviceID), similar to webcams and the like. The kernel module should get rid of the USB data wrapping and provide the data stream as it was prepared on the ST to some user space application that interprets commands and reads/writes data. Cheers, Raimund

Hi, I'm using an 800XL that I equipped with an SIO2PC board with a linux box as virtual floppy drive/disk image server. This works so well that I started wondering if there are similar solutions for the Atari ST? For those not familiar with SIO2PC: SIO2PC consists of two components: an Adapter cable that is plugged into the 800XL's floppy connector and in the serial port of the PC. The second component is a server software on the PC side provides access to disk images stored on the PC HDD and listens for floppy accesses on the cable. In case of a floppy access (booting, for instance), the software serves the data from the image to the cable. What's so good about it? a) its simple. Not much hardware needed: for the Atari 800XL the only hardware needed is a cable, an IC, a resistor, a diode and a capacitor. b) it's cheap. c) it's transparent. Software that requires a floppy boot (sometimes that seems to be necessary for some custom made file-systems to prevent copying) will work just as good as ordinary floppys with standard filesystems. d) in case of the 800XL it's 3 times faster than a real floppy. e) no floppy disks anymore. I also have a 1040STfm. My current way of running that machine is to copy .st and .msa disk images with a program called "stdisk" back to floppy on a Windows PC (couldn't find such software for Linux). That takes quite long, because each floppy first needs a sticker acreoos the HDD hole to make it appear like a 720K disk, then it's being formatted (about 20-30% of the floppies turn out to be broken during this phase) and afterwards the image gets copied. The next step is to carry the disk over to my ST, stuff it in and wait until its content is loaded... Compared with the 800XL this is a pain in the behind. A similar solution for the Atari ST should make comparably expensive IDE/SCSI harddrive solutions unnecessary. If anything similar is around and I didn't notice: could someone point it out to me? If nothing of this type is around yet, maybe there is interest among some of you folks to develop a SIO2PC solution for the ST. I'd definitely be interested to contribute the Linux side of things... Cheers, Raimund